Two for (slightly more than) the price of one

There's an article here talking about how a number of DC comic titles are going to add "co-features"--a second story focusing on a different character. Apparently they are going to add pages to the books in order to do this, and use it to bring the price up a dollar (because additional price + additional content = fewer annoyed fans).

It's kind of a neat idea, actually. Back in the day, it wasn't all that unusual to see back-up stories in comics. My impression at the time was that it was an older custom; older Marvel comic titles like Tales of Suspense would feature two separate ongoing storylines (Captain America and Iron Man, for example), but entirely new books (like Fantastic Four) would generally have only one story per comic. And a popular character would inevitably move on to his own solo book--IIRC eventually Iron Man got his own comic starting with issue #1, while Cap's own comic inherited the advanced numbering of the original shared title.

The books mentioned in the article are Booster Gold (which will gain a Blue Beetle feature) and Teen Titans (which will add a Ravager storyline). I would expect the former to pick up some new readers, since so many folks miss the recently-cancelled Blue Beetle book. And it may be that Ravager is enough of a breakout character to bring in new people (although I'd expect that a fair number of those who'd likely pick up TT because of the Ravager feature would have been buying the book anyway).

That's the issue, I suppose--is it more important for the second feature to be related to the main title somehow, or to bring in more readers? I'm guessing that Booster Gold will, because there are plenty of people who loved Blue Beetle who aren't necessarily all that interested in Booster. I don't know whether Teen Titans will get that sort of bump from a Ravager feature, although it may.

I do think that giving the upcoming Doom Patrol book a Metal Men backup is genius. Mainly because I read both as a kid (not regularly but occasionally) at around the same time, and they had the same sort of "feel" to them. That's subjective, of course, and I wouldn't base any financial projections on it. :)